shrewd California countryman when I was showing him about in the
traveling exhibit, the sanitation car: "Oh, this is all to get a job.
It's another form of graft--to get some money to spend."

It is true that the value of many health measures does not appear on
the surface. Sometimes it is necessary to wait for vital statistics to
prove a gain.

It is beginning to be thrown in the faces of sanitary authorities that
the laboratory wisdom does not reach the street; that there is not
enough, or rapid enough, improvement in general conditions. Newspapers
are ready, for the most part, to disseminate information and
benevolent societies write tracts, but we must remember how little
WORDS mean--especially printed words--to those unaccustomed to
acquiring information that way.

The actual showing in an alley of the process of cleaning up; the
going into a house and opening the windows at the top and tacking on a
wire netting to keep out the flies; the actual cleaning of the garbage
pail, perhaps, or at least the standing by and seeing that it is
properly done--all such actual doing, even if it is done only in one
house on a street, will spread the information all over the
neighborhood.

One of the most helpful offices is to tell the woman where she can
get the special article needed, and what it will cost, and to show her
the thing itself, in a friendly spirit. Such visits would soon
revolutionize the sanitary condition of any community.

Villages need this help even more than cities, for there they have
fewer chances to know about inventions and perhaps are less
resourceful in making them.

There may be races, as there are individuals, whom persecution drives
to progress--who do find means to execute unjust commands--but the
people a health officer has to deal with can be better led by kindness
and will learn from teachers, if the teaching is in the form of
example or demonstration.

It is an incontrovertible fact that to hasten sanitary reform it is
only necessary to hold out the helping hand; to encourage the ignorant
citizen to ask for instruction and direction, instead of placing upon
him the task of making bricks without either clay or straw. There are
times and seasons and individuals at which and on whom the bludgeon
must be used--the greater good covering the lesser evil; but such
cases are less common than present practice would seem to indicate.

The tenement house mother who has only one pan for all her